So I am going to create two tutorial series for 3D applications. One for Maya and one for Softimage.

Before I begin creating these videos I thought I would drop this scene file here as a starter for you to test.

I had always wanted to try and create a scene that was built with modern renderer features but with the old retro engine limitations.

Things like physical based fresnel fall off and to try and utilize the correct light fall offs (inverse squared) on soft lights. I wanted to find out how close one could get 20 years ago with the knowledge of things we take for granted today.

Normally these features are built inside Mental Ray and Renderman back in 1996 but even then they were not utilized due to heavy render time consumption. Though I am sure to some degree many were used on Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park to get the photoreal lighting.

Anyways I built this scene this morning using only the Maya software renderer. You can use it to test your SGI machine rendering capabilities. See how quickly it will render. I rendered it on both my 300 mhz machine in maya 4.0 and the 400 mhz machine in maya 6.5

I'll create a softimage scene to be placed here too and will hopefully follow up with a desktop recorded tutorial to show you how to arrive at this quality and build. (probably from my phone since I can't seem to install the desktop capture software correctly).

as for recording the screen, if you're using irix 6.5 you can use the default mediarecorder. just use a low frame rate.

I couldn't get it to go bigger than 640x480. It would error out. I'll try lower frame rate but I think there is something in my o2 setups that are looking at the hardware and only take predetermined resolutions like 720x486 etc etc. But I'll try to see if I can get a low frame rate full screen. It is the 16:9 sw1600 resolution. Easy for today but pretty big for 1996 capture.

I was led to another screencapture software that supposedly could do the full screen easy but could never figure out how to either install perl OR get it to see the installed perl.

Intuition wrote:I couldn't get it to go bigger than 640x480. It would error out. I'll try lower frame rate

i had no problems recording at 1280 with an r12000 octane. iirc i used the quicktime animation codec and 12 or 15 fps.the files get quite big but quicktime can read them so wrapping it up as h264 for example is easy.

def13 wrote:I would like to share my Octane's / Maya 6.5 render stats of your scene but where can I find them ?

in the console window. irix' console that is, nothing maya specific.

for the record, maya 6.5 is not vintage. with mental ray it has global illumination, ray traced soft shadows, final gathering and caustics. the only difference to todays renderers is that it's not physically based.if you want the vintage look you have to renounce indirect illumination and also use shadow maps.

This is all Maya Software render. I did it in Maya 4.0 with no Mental Ray. I used techniques on the shading and lighting that were available only in Maya 4.0 software renderer but borrow from automated methodology from today with inverse fall off, fresnel reflection, and using reflection instead of specular. Which is why there is a card to reflect which matches the area light. Because Area lights didn't reflect like actual reflector cards as most modern engines are setup for default. To get fresnel I used a gradient set to the facing ratio towards the camera with the sampler info node.

Not bad for the ol default Maya software renderer.

Modern engines make these kinds of things such that most people learning now have no idea what or why it is doing what it does. They weren't around for the renderman siggraph papers that all the other render engines learned from. Even modern Renderman makes it a button press ordeal.

Last edited by Intuition on Fri Nov 03, 2017 12:07 am, edited 1 time in total.